For those of you who only remember Caw-Blade as a machine-gun tournament winner, the scourge of the Star City Games Open Series about a year ago... Martell was actually part of the team that initially put Caw-Blade on the map. He played it to a Top 8 finish in Paris last year, losing only to eventual winner Ben Stark (also with Caw-Blade).

In this case, Martell associated the Lingering Souls deck very much with Caw-Blade and—with some brewing help from Sam Black—was all-in on the deck very quickly. It turned out to be a pretty good choice.

So how does this deck work?

Well... it's basically Caw-Blade. Stoneforge Mystic goes and gets a spicy piece of equipment, and then somebody carries it through the Red Zone to accumulate value and eventually win. Like Caw-Blade, Tom's Legacy brew can play an aggro-control game (using its counters and discard to protect a threat in play) or as a true control deck, eliminating threats and winning on card advantage, which is exciting...

... although Tom says what was most exciting was a High Tide opponent bricking after a successful Time Spiral.

The deck is fairly straightforward. Most of it is good cards, but some things might stick out for you.

Force of Will is primarily in the deck for combo decks. Yes, you do need the fast answer against a deck that is going to beat you on the first or second turn, but Legacy is full of all kinds of decks that don't do that.

"My deck—with all its Lingering Souls—can beat any deck playing fair. But Choke is very un-fair. If the opponent goes first and has a Noble Hierarch, you can't even play Ponder unless you have a Force of Will. But if you Force the Choke, they are stuck playing a fair game and you can beat decks that are playing fair."

Tom is quick to admit that Lingering Souls isn't very good against broken combo decks, but when it's good... it's really good. In the finals, his opponent was forced to Force of Will the front half of a Lingering Souls because his board was nothing but 1/1 creatures!

"He literally couldn't beat a Lingering Souls! Typically, the card Nimble Mongoose is a problem for straight control decks in Legacy, but even if they get to 3/3, my deck can just chump them all day while doing something else."

I asked Martell what the lesson of his 11th-hour Cinderella story was.

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"The real lesson is to keep an open mind, because even smart people can be dumb. All weekend I was being told how bad my deck was (because Lingering Souls isn't 'good enough' for Legacy), but the reality is, it was the best deck for the tournament."

If you want to hear Martell say more smart stuff like that reframing on Choke... well...

tom_martell Considering running the Legacy SCG this weekend in Sacramento. Anyone have a good list?

The Indianapolis Top 8 was studded with notable players, including ChannelFireball Legacy Weapon Caleb Durward (who once broke the format via Survival of the Fittest), multiple-SCG Open champion Dan Jordan, or the brilliant TCGPlayer.com columnist Adam Yurchick. Here is how the Legacy Top 8 shook out:

As you can see from Chilbert's decklist, tons and tons of the High Tide spells cost one mana, including the engine-like enabler Candelabra of Tawnos and namesake High Tide itself.

The basic incentive to this deck is that it can win relatively quickly (turn three requires very little sweat) and it is difficult for many decks to disrupt. So you can play an Island on your third turn for High Tide, tap your other two for , Turnabout your lands to untap, and have available for the Time Spiral. Ultimately, the goal is more action, card drawing, and filtering into a stormed Brain Freeze or netting sufficient mana from Candelabras, Spirals, and so on to make a massive Blue Sun's Zenith.

That said, it leans heavily on Force of Will, and isn't great at stopping an opponent from doing what he or she wants—or coming out ahead in an attrition fight. But like many combo decks, it benefits from opponents in Legacy being forced to respect creature decks... they have wasted draws that help give this fast deck even more time.

Twenty-eight of Caleb's main deck cards cost literally one mana! Including, of course, the archetype's signature starters, Nimble Mongoose and Delver of Secrets.

By now you have probably heard of this Delver of Secrets card; relatively young, the Insectile Aberration-to-be has successfully found success in... essentially very available format. Hall of Famers swung for 3 in the air on turn two to score Top 8s at Pro Tour Dark Ascension; it has scored Modern Blue Envelopes; and, of course, it pairs nicely with Mongoose here, as an undercosted aggro-control threat.

Nimble Mongoose might not fly... but it also doesn't die. You can't target the 'goose, and when the 'goose is loose at 3/3... the game shifts. RUG Delver has fast counterspells like Force of Will and Daze, and can use them to stop or punish combo players, but it is much happier protecting a board position while cracking for 3 to 6 a turn. Unlike many blue decks, this one has the efficiency on offense of green, cheap counters to protect the queen, and can close the game out with a flurry of red death via good old Lightning Bolt.

Caleb's specialized card quality was so high he felt no need for the fourth—or even third—Tarmogoyf (and, for that matter, would be willing to cut another)!

Kenny Castor also played a RUG Delver deck, albeit much more streamlined than Caleb's, with four copies of all three of his creatures and a less eclectic selection of one-ofs (i.e., no Predict or Thought Scour). Both players ran a Sensei's Divining Top + Counterbalance side plan in the extra fifteen, making RUG Delver one of the most versatile decks in the format, especially given its mana costs. Not only can it play a beatdown or aggro-control game with burn backup, but with Counterbalance + Sensei's Divining Top it can move to a combo-control line as well.

Dredge (as a concept) has been a consistent and consistently feared weapon of choice in essentially every format where it has been legal. The Legacy version with new Dark Ascension sorcery Faithless Looting puts the deck on a totally new level in terms of inevitable openers.

I guess "it depends," but Dredge is the kind of deck that laughs off traditional notions of cardboard card advantage. It can go down a card in Careful Study (or all its cards in Breakthrough) and put an opponent in an essentially no-win situation. It can fill the graveyard via Golgari Grave-Troll and Stinkweed Imp, allowing it to flip Ichorid, Narcomoeba, and other troublemakers. While it might seem down in cards, when you can use a free body to flash Cabal Therapy (also free) and simultaneously come up with one or more additional bodies via Bridge from Below... the realization of what Dredge can do with "no" cards might reframe some players' approach to answering that "Breakthrough for 0" question.

I think it was Stuart Wright who said Dredge is the kind of deck—because of the Ichorid and Cabal Therapy inclusion—where even if you can answer the "main" plan of Bridges and flashy turns, the Dredge deck can put you in a worse position than it is in, using entirely free resources.

And it's not like those Ichorids aren't just going to kill you anyway. Most conventional creature removal is unprofitable at best, and irrelevant even more often.

While superficially the same macro-archetype as Dan Jordan's deck, Pascal Maynard's build is quite a bit different. Although he played Umezawa's Jitte, he has no Stoneforge Mystic searching. Instead, Pascal played Crucible of Worlds, allowing for a Wasteland lock down and a fairly unique angle with Olle Rade, Sylvan Safekeeper. The mana denial sub-theme is even more compelling with Aven Mindcensor, which can put the opponent on an evasive clock and make life difficult for Onslaught and Zendikar sac-duals.